The following table illustrates, from January 1, 2001 to the present, all facility closings in Pennsylvania alone, mergers and/or significant name changes as indicated on the Pennsylvania Department of Health License.

Many closed or merged with other hospitals ( closing hospitals) long before Obamacare was passed..

Reports were mostly self-insured against medical malpractice lawsuits. The hospitals had created special trust funds to protect against future lawsuits.

Many of the claims currently in progress are in the pre-trial or trial stages. The fate of these malpractice claims depends in part on the amount of money this trust fund holds, which is a point of contention among interested parties.

Some reports allege that the funds for most hospitals contains between $150 and $250 million per hospital, though many believe that this money spent paying off creditors first, before going to settle any lawsuits.

However, Richard Kanowitz, an attorney for a firm representing six pending medical malpractice cases against a hospital, claimed these trust fund estimates were “woefully low.” Further, Kanowitz alleged that “there are a lot of serious injuries and deaths that will go unremedied.”

Hospitals all agree that having third-party insurance separate from its trust fund, but did not give a firm number on the amount of insurance available in their respected hospitals. In otherwords no hospital can survive with malpractice insurance rates so high and millions paid out in claims.

We must enact common sense lawsuit reforms to solve our medical liability crisis. Until we do so, hospitals will continue to close.

But it is more than a cost problem. As these hospital closings show, New York’s astronomical medical liability costs are affecting access to healthcare, often by those who need it most. In New York, 19 hospitals have closed since 2000, leaving several neighborhoods underserved.

Lawsuit Claims Hospitals Colluded to Hold Down Nurses’ Pay while the hospital made millions in profit.

In a coordinated move spanning four cities, nurses filed four federal lawsuits alleging that hospital systems conspired to keep their pay artificially low despite concerns of a nursing shortage. The suits, which seek class-action status, allege the systems shared information on pay practices with an understanding that they wouldn’t outbid one another to recruit nurses. Here are reports from the WSJ and NYT.

The lawsuits — put together with the help of the Service Employees International Union, which represents nurses and others — were filed yesterday in Chicago, San Antonio, Memphis, Tenn., and Albany, N.Y., against more than 17 hospitals. The suits allege that the hospitals violated federal antitrust laws.

Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, in Washington, D.C., brought the suits. A spokeswoman for one of the hospitals named as a defendant said the lawsuit is “completely without merit”; another called it “outrageous.”

A nurse serving as a plaintiff in one the lawsuits, told the Times that low wages were causing a nursing shortage in this country:“All of this has led to more of my nurse colleagues becoming travel agents, consultants and real estate agents.”

Obamacare has nothing to do with rising healthcare costs,it's been going on for years and years!!!

The Great American Hospital Pricing Scam Exposed-We Now Know Why Healthcare Costs Are So Artificially High:

It is no longer that simple as hospitals now artificially raise their rate card charges as a part of the negotiation process they enter into with private, for-profit health insurers.

When the dance between hospitals and health insurers began, if a hospital’s actual cost plus reasonable profit totaled $1,000 for a given procedure and the insurer demanded a 50 percent discount, the hospitals simply negotiated towards doubling the price from $1,000 to $2,000 in order to make it all work out. But over time, hospitals began to include other charges into the cost of a procedure, including their unpaid collectibles from patients who were uninsured and could not pay, losses in unrelated hospital divisions, inefficiency in how the hospital was being operated, etc. As time has progressed, this approach has grown so out of hand that any rational explanation for pricing no longer appears to exist.

Who pays for this?

If you are insured, you are paying for these inexplicable charges through the ever-rising cost of your insurance premiums. And if you are one of the unfortunate millions of Americans who has no health insurance, you are being charged at these shamefully inflated rate card prices—virtually guaranteeing financial ruin should the uninsured experience an illness and become obligated to pay at full, rate card price.

Can there be any economic explanation for this vast chasm between the rate card charges from one hospital to the next?

Certainly, there are explanations as to why costs might be higher in one region of the country than another. Labor rates vary from region to region as can real estate prices to acquire the land and building for a hospital. One can also understand how treatment by a highly regarded physician or staff, or a hospital with dramatically higher success rates, would create price variances

So, is this information proof positive of the benefits of consumer driven healthcare? Now that we see these ridiculous disparities, will consumers of healthcare be motivated to avoid hospitals that are charging grossly inflated prices in favor of lower-cost facilities, forcing the more expensive providers to lower their prices in order to compete?

Maybe. But today’s news is hardly going to come as a surprise to the private health insurance companies who have been complicit in this charade for so many years. Do we not have to ask why these companies would have allowed this insanity to happen? Certainly, the private insurers have more than adequate leverage in their negotiations as no hospital could hope to survive without negotiated agreements with the largest health insurance companies.

Just ask anyone without health insurance who has racked up a bill at the hospital only to be hounded into bankruptcy by incredibly aggressive collection agencies acting on behalf of the hospitals. Or ask someone who is uninsured and was required to pay up in full before the hospital was willing to provide life-saving medical care only to be denied treatment when they couldn’t produce the cash.

If you want to know why healthcare costs are so much more in America than other nations—while delivering care that is statistically no better in many instances—today’s data provides you with what is likely the most significant piece of the answers you seek.

So in other words, if you are uninsured, you better get some healthcare,or pay the fine, if you choose to pay the fine,you still have no healthcare and hope you dont get real sick and end up with a 80K hospital bill or else you might file for bankruptcy and lose your home.....

Next the government will tell you that you need car insurance incase you get into a wreck and kill someone ( Opps! They already have that law !)and guess what you can shop around for car insurance anywhere !! How about that!

If you are going to address the high cost of health care, start by completely altering the delivery system. There is a serious problem when you have people in your community with no health care. You have moms with sick children who can’t afford to take their child to a hospital. We have people living in the streets of our communities while one health care system takes out millions of dollars to pay top salaries. And people wonder why health care costs have risen? When one CEO gives himself a 50 percent pay raise and earns multimillions, you wonder why health care costs have risen. Health care costs are rising because CEOs are paying themselves more and charging the public higher prices. Board members of health care corporations rubber-stamp everything because they were appointed to the board by the CEO. To control health care costs, start by changing the delivery system. Cap CEO pay. Limit boards to three years and boot them out. This is what reforms should address.

Fifty-five hospitals announced settlements totaling $34 million in the long-running whistle-blower lawsuit that alleges that the maker of spinal-surgery equipment coached healthcare providers on ways to maximize revenue by overbilling Medicare.

More than 100 hospitals have now settled overpayment cases involving kyphoplasty, a surgical procedure in which an inflatable tube is used to create a cavity of air inside a compressed vertebra and then filled with cement to strengthen the bone. In many cases, kyphoplasty can be done on a same-day outpatient basis, but equipment-maker Kyphon is accused of encouraging hospitals to keep patients overnight to increase Medicare reimbursement.

Hospitals have now paid about $75 million in False Claims Act settlements to resolve the cases. In addition, Medtronic Spine, which acquired Kyphon in 2007 for $3.9 billion, paid $75 million the year after the acquisition to settle the allegations.

None of the hospitals, nor the makers of the devices, have admitted the wrongdoing alleged by two former Kyphon employees in a 2005 False Claims complaint.

The 55 hospital settlements announced Tuesday were drawn from 21 states, and included 23 hospitals owned by for-profit chain HCA that are paying a collective $7.1 million. Five hospitals operated by not-for-profit Trinity Health are paying $3.9 million.

The individual settlements ranged from $552,000 to more than $4 million. The largest single-hospital settlement announced Tuesday was for $4.2 million from Atrium Medical Center in Middletown, Ohio. A full list of the hospitals that settled was posted on the U.S. Justice Department's website.

Revealing how irrelevant market forces are to the U.S. health care system, the Obama administration last week released data on how much hospitals charge for the 100 most common inpatient procedures billed to Medicare. The numbers show the hospitals charge Medicare wildly varying amounts—often 10 to 20 times the amount Medicare actually reimburses—that bear little relation to the actual costs of providing care. The database--which includes claims filed in fiscal year 2011--holds 163,065 individual charges made at 3,337 hospitals located in 306 metropolitan areas.

The worst overcharging hospital was Bayonne Medical Center in New Jersey, which charged the highest amounts for almost one-quarter of the treatments. Bayonne Medical typically charged $99,689 for treating a case of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), 5.5 times more than other hospitals and 17.5 times more than Medicare paid in reimbursement. Neither Bayonne's costs nor its outcomes justified such a price premium. Even within the same metropolitan area, hospitals charge prices that differ enormously from one another, with Bayonne charging $155,769 for major joint replacement surgery, more than nine times the price at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx.

As Jonathan Blum, Deputy Administrator and Director for the Center of Medicare at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, explains,“Our purpose for posting this information is to shine a much stronger light on these practices. What drives some hospitals to have significantly higher charges than their geographic peers? I don't think anyone here has come up with a good economic argument.”

As health care economists have long pointed out, the fact that most Americans have health care coverage that insulates them from health care costs means that price has little real meaning. Neither Medicare, nor Medicaid, nor private insurance actually pay the amounts listed on a hospital bill, instead using systems of standardized payments for treating specific conditions. Despite their unreality, hospital list prices help determine the level of those standardized payments, and in turn the level of insurance premiums paid by consumers.

Few things are more common in a hospital setting than a bag of saline solution, used to administer medicines via intravenous (IV) delivery. They cost hospitals $1 to $5. The price listed on a hospital bill is frequently more like $100 to $500.

The New York Times' Nina Bernstein followed several victims of a May 2012 case of food poisoning that took place in Carmel, N.Y.

According to the report, hospital charges for IV therapy ranged from $91 to $787, even in cases where the hospital billed separately for items like administering the IV and emergency room services.

At White Plains Hospital, for example, one patient's bill showed a $91 charge for a unit of saline solution that cost the hospital 86 cents, according to the Times. Another bill included $546 for six liters of saline that cost the same hospital $5.16.

New York TimesLove It Or Hate ItObamacare is redistrbution of wealthThe truth is starting to come out

Its the redistribution of your insanity that's at work here....a world where facts and the truth are just innocent bystanders waiting to get run over by an 18 wheeler driven by you and that ever lovin Jimmy D-mint.

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